ROTP Races

01How a race is defined

One data file, a few hundred lines — and only about fifteen of them are gameplay.

Every race is a definition.txt under races/<Race>/, parsed by a single factory into a SpeciesSkills object. The overwhelming majority of each file is presentation: mugshots, diplomat sprite placement, transport landing animations, troop death frames, flag artwork, voice and ambience keys. The gameplay lives in roughly fifteen lines at the end.

The gameplay keys, and what varies across the ten originals:

Note the pattern: eight of the ten races change exactly one or two mechanical numbers from the baseline. Only research, relations and the leader distributions vary across the board. The design is deliberately sparse — one strong, legible advantage per race rather than a dense stat block.

02The comparison

Every field where the ten originals actually differ. Baseline values are dimmed.

Economy, growth and combat

Meklar also ignore factory refit costs — their factories are never stranded at an obsolete robotic-controls level.

Research

The six category numbers are cost multipliers — lower is better. "Tree seen" is the probability each individual tech survives the per-empire thinning at empire creation; techs that fail that roll can never be researched by that empire at all.

Diplomacy and espionage

03What each stat actually does

Where the numbers land in the game's formulas.

Population growth

baseGrowthRate = max(0, (1 - currentPop / maxPop) / 10);
...
baseGrowthRate *= empire.growthRateMod();      // popmod / 100

A flat multiplier on the logistic growth curve. Sakkra's doubling compounds hard, because faster growth means earlier maximum population means more production means faster everything. Silicoid's halving is the price of their environmental immunity.

Worker productivity and factories

workerProductivity() = ((planetologyTechLevel * 3 + 50) / 100) * workerProductivityMod();
maxRobotControls()   = topRobotControls() + robotControlsAdj();

Klackon's doubled worker productivity is the single largest raw economic modifier in the game — every colonist produces twice the BC. Meklar's +2 works differently: it raises how many factories each unit of population can operate, so their colonies out-produce equivalents at the same population rather than needing more of it.

Ground combat

troopCombatAdj(defending) =
    raceGroundBonus + armorBonus + battleSuitBonus + shieldBonus + weaponBonus
    + (defending ? 5 : 0);

// then, per individual trooper:
attRoll = random(100) + attacker.combatAdj();
defRoll = random(100) + defender.combatAdj();
if (attRoll < defRoll)  attacker loses a trooper;
else                    defender loses a population;

Ground combat is resolved one soldier at a time as a pair of d100 rolls. Bulrathi's +25 applies on both attack and defence, and the defender always gets an additional +5.

That defender's +5 matters more than it looks. Against equal tech, an ordinary attacker wins only 45% of individual exchanges — invading is a losing proposition unless you bring more troops than the defender has population. Bulrathi's bonus lifts that to 68%, which flips invasion from expensive to efficient. It is the difference between needing a two-to-one advantage and needing none.

Ship bonuses

shipAttackBonus adds to the attack level used in every to-hit calculation. shipDefenseBonus adds to both beam and missile defence. shipInitiativeBonus adds to combat initiative, deciding who fires first. Mrrshan get attack and initiative; Alkari get defence and initiative. Both hit first; the Mrrshan hit harder, the Alkari are harder to hit.

Environmental immunity

The Silicoid flag is the broadest single ability in the game. It makes waste cleanup cost zero and factory productivity immune to pollution, skips the planet's growth penalty entirely, and lets them colonise every planet type from turn one without any Controlled Environment technology. In exchange they grow at half speed and pay a 25% research premium on five of six categories.

Research modifiers

Two separate levers that are easy to confuse. Tree seen is the probability each tech survives the per-empire thinning — it determines what exists for you. RP output is a flat multiplier on research points produced. The six category numbers multiply the cost of every tech in that category. Psilon are the only race that gets all three at once, which is why they are the strongest research race by a wide margin rather than a narrow one.

04Race relations

A baseline opinion of every other species, before any treaty or grievance.

Each race declares a default opinion plus specific exceptions. This value is the constant floor of the relations scale — it is added before treaty adjustments and before the sum of live incidents, so it biases every relationship from first contact onward.

Three patterns fall straight out of the grid:

• Everyone likes Humans. Human is the only race whose default opinion of everyone is +7, and every other race lists Human as a +7 exception. Combined with their trade, diplomacy and council bonuses, Human is unambiguously the diplomatic race.
• Nobody likes Darloks. Darlok's default opinion of everyone is −7, and every other race lists Darlok as a −7 exception. The spy race starts every relationship in the hole.
• Two real feuds. Mrrshan and Alkari sit at −31 mutual — the deepest hostility in the game, and near the hate-war threshold before anything has even happened. Mrrshan and Sakkra are at −19. Meanwhile Klackon, Meklar and Silicoid form a quiet +7 bloc.

05Leader tendencies

Not a fixed trait — a probability distribution rolled once per game.

Each race declares two six-way distributions, one over leader personalities and one over objectives. A leader is drawn from them when the empire is created, so the same race plays differently between games. Every race uses the same shape: one dominant option at 50–60%, with the remainder spread thinly.

Most of these read as intended — Psilon pacifist technologists, Mrrshan ruthless militarists, Klackon xenophobic industrialists, Sakkra aggressive expansionists. Two are worth a second look: Bulrathi lean Ecologist, which sits oddly against a race whose entire mechanical identity is ground invasion; and Darlok lean Diplomat, which is either a joke or a deliberate cover story for the spy race.

These distributions matter because leader traits modify almost every diplomatic threshold in the game — war thresholds, how long grievances are remembered, pact and alliance thresholds, and how readily an empire exploits a weaker neighbour. Randomising AI personalities in the game options bypasses the race distributions entirely.

06The ten races

What each one is actually for.

07Ship design doctrine

28 numbers per race that steer how the AI builds fleets.

Beyond the three combat bonuses, each race carries a shipdesign line of 28 values that the AI's ship-design templates read. It is the least visible race attribute and one of the more influential:

These weights also feed tech valuation, so a race that prefers a device will research toward it. A separate preferredship key names both the race's ship artwork set and its preferred hull size; the hull size biases AI design, and under an optional rule it also changes real ship cost, space and armor.

08Fields that look like stats and are not

Worth knowing before you read a definition file and draw conclusions.

Several keys in every race file are vestigial or purely cosmetic. Reading them as gameplay values is the easiest mistake to make with this data: